The government will announce a plan to prevent nationwide internet outages from affecting Pakistan’s IT industry, according to Federal Minister for IT and Telecommunication Shaza Fatima Khawaja, who said the move would support the sector’s continued growth. Speaking at an American Business Forum (ABF) and LUMS Thought Leadership Session titled “Taking Pakistan’s IT Industry to the Next Level,” held at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Khawaja outlined several steps the ministry is pursuing, with government officials, industry leaders, and academics gathered to discuss IT exports, connectivity, skills, and taxation. Khawaja said IT industry connections would be whitelisted during critical periods, allowing companies to maintain internet access even when wider connectivity disruptions affect the broader public network, addressing a concern that has repeatedly surfaced in parliamentary committee sessions and industry complaints over the past two years.
Beyond outage mitigation, the minister said the government is focusing on fibre networks, mobile broadband, spectrum allocation, and satellite regulations, framing these measures as directly linked to Pakistan’s $15 billion IT export target. This connectivity focused agenda builds on a series of infrastructure announcements the ministry has made in recent months, including efforts to expand submarine cable capacity and 5G rollout, as the government works to position reliable internet access as a foundational requirement for scaling the country’s IT exports rather than treating connectivity and export growth as separate policy tracks. However, Khawaja acknowledged that the country still faces a major shortage of job ready technology workers, citing a national baseline test in which around 33,000 seventh and eighth semester computer science students were assessed, with only 0.4 percent scoring above 80 percent and around 4 percent scoring above 68 percent across ten employability competencies.
“The jobs are there. The opportunity is there. But the right people with the right skills are not there,” Khawaja said, calling for changes in university curricula, teaching methods, and the K-12 education system to close the gap between what universities produce and what the industry actually needs. Industry leaders at the session echoed similar concerns from different angles, with Umair Khan, co-founder and chairman of Folio3 and founding partner of Mentors Fund, arguing that Pakistan must move beyond freelancing and calling for better K-12 education, stable tax policy, and stronger public-private partnerships to help technology companies compete internationally. Ahmed Azmat, Director of Operations at Stewart Pakistan, a company that has operated in the country for more than 15 years, pointed to local firms already developing technology products for international clients, noting that Stewart itself is expanding its local operations through a $1.3 million investment in a new office at the National NSTEP facility.
The session also touched on gender participation in the sector, with Dr Hadia Majid of LUMS highlighting technology’s potential to increase women’s workforce participation, noting that remote work can offer greater flexibility and economic independence while cautioning that it could also reinforce existing social norms around women’s employment if broader structural changes aren’t pursued alongside it. Dr Syed Sohail H. Naqvi, Chairperson of Knowledge Streams and Director of EdTech at TMC, offered a different perspective on the skills gap, arguing that universities are not the sole source of the problem and that the bigger issue is a lack of jobs capable of absorbing skilled workers, calling instead for increased government procurement and greater opportunities for local technology companies. Speakers at the session, moderated by Dr Ihsan Ayyub Qazi of LUMS’s Faculty of Computer Science, broadly agreed that reliable internet, better skills, and stable taxes remain the key levers for turning Pakistan’s growing IT and freelancing base into globally competitive technology businesses capable of sustaining higher IT export volumes over time.
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